I was under impression that iOS apps are pretty often just HTML5 applications packed in iOS app format. Can't that mechanism be used to enable these games to be played offline? Of course it's some extra effort for the publisher, but I think iOS is big enough platform to justify some.
I was under impression that iOS apps are pretty often just HTML5 applications packed in iOS app format.
Typical native iOS apps are not like that. They are written in Objective-C against the CocoaTouch framework and are compiled down to native code.
You do get apps in the appstore that are written in html/javascript but even those will come with any extra resources they have shipped as part of the app itself.
If you're doing a purely web-based app that is meant to be installed directly from a web site, you can, as you say, instruct the browser to cache resources for offline use. However I'm not sure if there's a limit to the amount of resources that can be cached. Presumably there will be some kind of limit and games (which are heavy on graphics and sound) may easily cross that limit.
